Eating paleo and shopping in my sleep: "Free the Animal" reviewed.
Writer, blogger and entrepreneur Richard Nikoley is one of the more colorful and unique characters in the paleo blogosphere. He and I are very different people and I don't agree with him on everything by a long shot. The posts on his blog, Free the Animal, are blunt, confrontational, often delivered with unabashed profanity...but they are also downright entertaining. His take-no-prisoners attitude, especially pronounced when met with stupidity or bad reasoning, often provides much-needed doses of reality for the paleo community, whose information-cycling bloggers often seem to exist in a grass-fed and organically-pastured netherworld of online pontification.
The past year saw my own transition into a paleo-style diet and lifestyle. What began as a gradual series of minor lifestyle changes in an effort to lose weight, (portion control, cutting out soda, etcetera), led to deeper study that went beyond weight loss and into the ideas surrounding “ancestral” health. By the time Nikoley released the printed version of his take on paleo living, Free the Animal: How to Lose Weight and Fat on the Paleo Diet, I was already a grain-free, fifty pounds lighter, Vibram-wearing stereotype and I doubted the book would contain information that I hadn’t heard before from one source or another. However, I enjoy the blog and respect the man enough that a purchase of the print edition of Free the Animal was justified.
At least, I think I purchased it.
The exact event of my ordering the book remains a little hazy in my mind. I remember adding it to my Amazon.com wish list, then waking up one morning to an email confirming an order for it. There were extenuating circumstances--it was late in the semester and school was keeping me up at odd hours; I’ve come to expect occasional blackouts during such periods. However, in this case I suspect that a larger game might have been afoot, for upon my telling the 140-character version of this story on Twitter, I received a response from the man himself:
Hmm...well played, sir.
The apparent dubiousness of the purchase aside, I would like to share my opinion on Richard’s book, and how it measured up to my expectations.
The book is quite literally a printed compilation of Nikoley’s blog entries about the paleo lifestyle; compiled and printed by the ebook publishing company, HyperInk. In the interest of reaching a broader audience, Nikoley’s trademark colorful vocabulary has been toned down considerably, but his personality remains strong, as does the communication of his ideas without the extra saltiness.
The book has fourteen major sections, each of them easy to read and digest:
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Paleo, Primal, Ancestral Lifestyle
- Chapter 2: Your Inner Animal
- Chapter 3: The Standard American Diet And Other Diet Health Disasters
- Chapter 4: Fat Is King
- Chapter 5: The Cholesterol Con
- Chapter 6: Natural Disease Prevention
- Chapter 7: Eat Like A Caveman
- Chapter 8: The Power of Fasting
- Chapter 9: Evolutionary Exercise And Fitness
- Chapter 10: A Primal Weight Loss Plan
- Chapter 11: Recipes And Supplements
- Chapter 12: Success Stories
- About The Blog
The information in the book is solid and presented cohesively, as can be expected. But instead of giving away all of the information it contains, I would like to hone in what I felt set it apart from most literature about ancestral living. Unlike the path taken by most paleo nutritionists, Free the Animal does more than provide yet another treatise on insulin spikes, omega-3s and fat-protein-carbohydrate ratios; Free the Animal presents the paleo lifestyle as common sense.
Yes, Nikoley discusses nutrition and biology; yes, he discusses the psychology of food and intermittent fasting. But unlike the professional gurus who go to great pains to overawe readers with a doctoral dissertation’s worth of facts, statistics and observational studies, Nikoley’s book lays out the paleo lifestyle and its guiding philosophies in a refreshingly relatable way.
For paleo newcomers, I would honestly recommend Free the Animal as the starting point before moving on to the lengthier works of gurus like Robb Wolf or Mark Sisson. It isn’t that Richard Nikoley or Free the Animal are a “better” choice; to the contrary, most other paleo nutritionists provide much more detailed information, and longer and more colorful books to boot. But the main reason I loved Free the Animal was its no-frills, straightforward presentation. Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint changed my life last year, but I have to admit that its sheer amount of information scared me to death when I first picked it up.
By comparison, Free the Animal is both more and less of an assault to those readers who are just beginning to be interested in paleo nutrition. It is more of an assault because Nikoley does not suffer fools lightly and pulls few punches as a communicator. But Free the Animal nevertheless remains extremely relatable. Ever chapter presents its subject(s) through more than just the interpretation of impersonal data; Nikoley relates the impact of ancestral health, nutrition and fitness to everyday life. By attaching it to concrete ideas like personal appearance, productivity and a healthy sex life, the impact of the paleo diet takes on a significance beyond buzzwords like “burning fat” or “building muscle.”
So, is Free the Animal worth purchasing?
If you are already eating like a caveman, chances are you won’t learn anything new. However, if you want good introductory material in your lending library, this is a great book to keep around. And if you need a gift for “one of those friends” who complain ceaselessly about their weight while stubbornly continuing to fill up on empty and processed food products, Richard Nikoley’s Free the Animal might provide the necessary shot in the arm.
Free the Animal (Blog)
Purchase “Free the Animal: Lose Weight and Fat on the Paleo Dietl” on Amazon
New Hub: "All Natural," and other grocery store misnomers.
If you are a Starbucks fan, you will enjoy this post.
Today's entry links to an article I published on HubPages. The subject is food marketing and its use of vague terms like "fortified" and "all natural" to promote some foods over others. What do these terms even mean?
Is "all natural" really natural, or just a game of semantics?
Are whole grains and multi grains are really as healthy as they are purported as being? And what about fiber? And is a "healthy" smoothie really better than something from Starbucks?
The article is a bit lengthy at about 1,500 words, plus links to supplementary sources and supplementary material, but if you are interested in nutrition and its relationship to culture, you will enjoy it.
The Southern Problem Pt. I - Observations
There is a reason that food tastes good. If food were meant to just be nourishment, and nothing more, taste buds would be unnecessary. Fruit would not exist. Instead of a there being a smorgasbord of cuisines to help define cultures all over the world, humans would be content to subsist off of generic pastes or nutrient wafers; real-life food would be like Soylent Green.
However, it just so happens that food is so much more than the sum of its nutrients and energy potential. Food is delicious. Food is meant to be enjoyed and embraced for both health and taste.
The problem I see in the food culture of America, is that we have succeeded. We are a wealthy nation, and our abundance of food, the plethora companies providing food and food products on a grand scale and the quality of our healthcare reflects just how well we have done as a nation.
We have plenty of food with which to make other foods, allowing for companies to make a tidy living selling variations on food, some naturally of higher quality or nutritional value than others, but the point still stands.
And as to our healthcare system, we can get by eating pretty much anything, because medications and technologies exist to do damage control over both the short and long-term problems brought on by an unhealthy diet. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in my home region of the American South. I watched a few minutes of Blazing Saddles on the CMT Network last week. It was presented through the program Southern Fried Flicks, with each segment of the film introduced with an celebrity interview or correlating food item by "southern goddess," Hazel Smith.
The presentation of otherwise good films through a program like this is abhorrent to me on several levels. The immediate pairing of "Southern" with "fried" is a descriptive term long devoid of charm in my own mind. Furthermore, the presentation of a grossly overweight woman peddling cheaply-prepared, fried foods is a gimmick which one would assume would yield diminished returns in most markets for the visual depiction of cause-and-effect, especially in the post-Paula Deen era. To present Hazel Smith as a "goddess" because she has an accent and a country music background is an affront to every healthy, beautiful Southern woman I have ever known.
These are some fairly petty grievances to take with a show I would not have even turned on had Blazing Saddles not caught my eye in the channel guide. But it brought to mind an issue which has been germinating in my mind for a while: Southern image problem.
As a native Floridian from the non-Disney wasteland of northwest Florida, I honestly resent the popular image of a typical Southerner as a paranoid, racist, homophobic and uneducated cretin, one generation removed from the Deliverance crowd but still marrying within the family. Country music, once an honest expression of working-class emotion, now an American Idol-approved industry capitalizing on the image of plaid shirts, denim shorts and cowboy boots, is certainly no help, either. But one of the biggest issues to me is our food.
Southern cooking is loved and hated in one way or another all over the country. Every native Southerner, from Kentucky to Florida, has memories of at least one relative (usually aged and female) who disappeared into their kitchens and engaged in culinary magic resulting in savory and sweet dishes that combined any and all comforting foods into bakes, casseroles, pastries and side dishes. My own memories along these lines concern my Mississippi-born grandmothers. They both moved to the Florida Panhandle from the Mississippi Delta and combined the best of Delta fare with Florida's seafood offerings to create dishes which left indelible memories.
Now, the problem with Southern cooking is that, due to the hardscrabble economic circumstances which surrounded many of the Southern States, our cooking traditions, which persist to this day, resulted mostly from poverty. The ingredients available to agricultural communities of lesser means defined the food which came from these communities.
The impacts of economics, agriculture and ingredient availability and population demographics are visible in much more detail than just the broad spectrum, Cracker Barrel image of Southern food to the country at large. The ubiquitous practice of frying chicken became prevalent in the South because it was a common practice for many of the Africans who were kidnapped into slavery and whose descendants carried on the traditions in their own kitchens and those of their owners across the South. Familiar, regional crops such as rice, beans and yams defined the dishes which arose out of the Carolinas and Louisiana to produce such distinctive branches of southern fare as Creole and Gullah cuisines. The availability of seafood in coastal states led to the incorporation of fish, shrimp, crawfish and oysters into the definitive dishes of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. The cheapness of lard, cornmeal and flour was responsible for biscuits and cornbread becoming such an identifiable pastry in the South, much more than its Scottish grandfather, the scone, which remained more common in the north.
All of these varieties, and many others, are the components which make up the whole of southern food. Southern food was born largely of poverty, it is very carbohydrate-based, and was made to be filling and satisfying to meet the needs of people who worked hard labor their entire lives. As anyone who has ever spent a holiday in a traditional Southern home, where all the classics tend to converge at a single meal, the food coma concomitant with such heavy fare is not unfamiliar.
However satisfying it might have been intended to be, for most people, food is not so hard to come by, nor our daily workload so difficult, that we need to eat massive amounts of biscuits, gravy, potatoes and fried cuts of meat on a regular basis. The following graph was a self-assessment in which the sampled population rated the quality of their diet and the amount of money they spent on food. Take a look:
This graph was part of a larger study, but was the segment of it which I found most interesting. Whether people think they are eating well or eating poorly, they are spending about the same amount of money on food. This seems to communicate that healthy food and unhealthy food are both in ready supply, but if the restaurant choices and belt-straining waistlines of my hometown are any indication, Southern-influenced comfort foods, "soul food," fast food and pre-packaged foods continue to reign as the options of choice for dining both out and in.
Part of this is resultant from the forty-year miseducation of the public as to what constitutes a "healthy diet." This is worth its own post, and is already the stated purpose of multiple books and blogs. But viewed as a whole, the shortcomings and detrimental effect of American food culture are showing themselves more every day.
In pop culture, the likes of Paula Deen and Hazel Smith are presented as womanhood's Southern norm. The average southern man is far more likely to watch football than to ever pick up a pigskin himself after high school, and his appearance tends to reflect that fact. And don't even get me started on Nascar.
In short, Southerners have a immediate connotation with obesity, and I'm sorry to say, the facts back it up. Diabetes is more prevalent in the American Southeast, and has been for years. Southerners do it to themselves through a historical nutrient-deficient diet, which continues in the modern day in correlation with the national trends of increased overall caloric intake (see diagram 2-1).
The problems are evident. For the next few weeks, I plan to continue with this theme and post a series of entries about the history of southern food, agriculture and health. Everyone knows there is a problem, but I want to dive in and find the root cause, focusing on the South. Whether it be simple correlation or as concrete proof of cause, I want to see what is available. I find food history interesting and this is a good excuse to dive into some research.
I will still be posting lighter fare to keep the blog from becoming a one-note stream of data, but you can count on at least one sizable post a week about Southern food culture for an indefinite period of time. Stay tuned!
External Links:
Southern Fried Flicks - CMT
Paul Deen and Diabetes - Diabetes-Warrior.Net
"Hogs and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America," by Frederick Douglass Opie - Google Books
Louisiana Creole cuisine: Overview - Wikipedia
"Low country Gullah/Geechee Soul food" and African based cuisine - CravesSoulFood
What's the Difference Between Biscuits and Scones? - YumSugar
The Best Way to Get Diabetes: Follow the Diabetes Dietary Guidelines - Mark's Daily Apple
Profiling Food Consumption in America - USDA Factbook (PDF)
Favorite Blogs: Fitness and Nutrition
If it's true that what goes around comes around, I'd like to start throwing a little love toward some of my favorite blogs.
This week, I want to focus on blogs about healthy nutrition and fitness.
Almost a year ago, I decided to make some fairly drastic changes in my life. I was very overweight and eating a steady diet of processed, unhealthy food. Starting last June, I made incremental lifestyle changes to the point where I am right now; fifty pounds lighter and enjoying a grain-free, primal/paleo diet of whole foods.
To stay current on information and stay inspired in my new lifestyle, I read a lot of blogs about paleo nutrition and natural exercise. I am also building a home library of books which I steadily lend out to friends and family seeking a new lease on life. In that spirit of sharing knowledge, these are a few of my favorite blogs, with my reasons for liking them:
- Diabetes-Warrior.Net - Steve Cooksey has not cured his diabetes, but he no longer takes medication for it. He manages his health entirely through a low-carb paleo diet and keeps up a lifestyle which is far more active and healthy than most diabetics can even dream of without insulin. His blog is rife with data gathered through research and self-experimentation. I am not diabetic and never have been, but Steve is an inspiration, and his straightforward approach to health and longterm wellness is just a reminder that Hippocrates was right when he said "let thy food be thy medicine."
- Fed Up With Lunch - Sarah Wu, known for a long time under the pseudonym "Mrs. Q," is an amazing human being. She is committed to improving the quality of American school lunches. Sarah ate these lunches for a year before writing a book about her experiences. Her blog has a global perspective, examining the content, quality and cost of school lunches around the world, and her friendly, conversational writing style helps expose ways in which American school systems can help their kids through serving them better food.
- Free the Animal - The online paleo community is made up of many diverse personalities. Richard Nikoley is one of the more colorful figures in the blogosphere. Styling himself as the "Angry Dick" of paleo bloggers, Richard has a no-nonsense delivery which appeals to me. He is also a titan in the field of self-experimentation. If there is a sacred cow, he will chase it down and convert it to burger, just to see what happens. Free the Animal has great value as a source of researched data and experiments on a variety of topics, but it is also worth reading for its sheer entertainment value. I recently picked up Richard's book, also entitled Free the Animal, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a starting point for anyone interested in a paleo meal plan.
- Gnolls.org - J. Stanton authored one of the most life-changing novels I ever read in the form of his book The Gnoll Credo. It is a story which made me clean out my closet and reevaluate my life. I wrote a review of it on Hubpages, which actually led to my corresponding with Stanton via email. Stanton is a proponent of ancestral health, and his articles on nutrition and biology are both interesting and exhaustively researched. Readers beware; reading anything written by J. Stanton is liable to cause unscheduled life change, increase in focus and sudden and vocal expressions of primal energies. You have been warned.
- LivingSuperhuman - Brothers Andrew and Anthony Frezza don't settle for anything less than life lived to the fullest. They are committed to encouraging other people to break plateaus and raise the bar for themselves as both physical and emotional beings, hence the presence of "superhuman" in the blog's title. It is less a stated "paleo blog" than it is about eating foods that yield optimum results. It just so happens that the best foods to eat fall in line with a paleo meal plan. Together, the Frezzas provide excellent workout advice, nutrition information and recipes for delicious and nutrient-dense meals designed for athletes' needs. LivingSuperhuman also recognizes something that many other paleo-minded writers minimize: that "cheat" meals are inevitable. Instead of criticizing or reminded people to mind their creeping carb counts, the voices of LS are encouraging, going so far as to freely share their own (infrequent) indulgences. In my opinion, such departure from the rigidity of dogma elevates Frezzas; both as a fitness writers and as all-around decent human beings. I'm currently involved in their Superhuman50 Challenge.
- Mark's Daily Apple - When someone first begins to research paleo nutrition, their first encounter is usually through the work of either Mark Sisson or Robb Wolfe. Mark Sisson's web site is updated steadily with articles, recipes and advice for living a healthy lifestyle according to Mark's easy to follow template, The Primal Blueprint. Mark writes excellent books and sells powerhouse nutritional supplements, but 99% of his work is available for free on his web site, indexed according to topic in an excellent search engine. Mark is a rare breed of health guru. He has an educational background in nutrition, a professional background as an world-class marathoner, and a compelling story of his own personal journey from a conventional athletic diet to a primal lifestyle which he makes extremely accessible to his readers. Mark's work is important to me, because it was his book and blog which were most instrumental in helping me to take control of my own life and reclaim my health. I always read his blog first.
- Physical Living - John Sifferman is a more recent discovery, but his blog is excellent. He talks about nutrition from time to time, but his blog is all about fitness. His workouts range from new strategies for old favorites (his posts about pull-ups are fantastic), to compound workout drills for more unique training tools and methods, such as clubbells.
- Zen to Fitness - Sometimes, information becomes so familiar that we stop hearing it. Zen to Fitness is a great blog because it takes the concept of fitness, which should be simple but is usually overcomplicated in the way it's presented, and reduces it back to its simplest terms. Needing to think less about something isn't always a bad thing; over-thinking fitness is usually what makes it drudgery, and Chris, the editor of Zen to Fitness, keeps the site stocked with articles espousing a healthy, fit lifestyle that is achieved and maintained through very simple methods.
The Superhuman50!
If you haven't done so yet, now is the time to head over to LivingSuperhuman and get started with the first Superhuman50 Challenge! Run by Andrew and Anthony Frezza, the Superhuman50 Challenge is a chance to jumpstart your fitness and health goals alongside many others, under the constructive and encouraging coaching provided by the Frezza brothers. I've been following their site for a while now, and I can vouch for them without reservation. I'm looking forward to getting started.
I went through a very dramatic personal transformation over the past year. Last summer was when it hit me that I had let myself go. I could feel my stomach moving at odds with the rest of my body when I walked. Running was impossible. I could still crank out a decent number of calisthenics, but I would be out of breathe for several minutes after each set.
I made the decision to overhaul my entire life via the Primal Blueprint, and have been transitioning toward a stricter, paleo approach to eating. I eat heartily of real, whole foods (including plenty of red meat and butter!), and exercise a few times a week. This is the transformation:
I'm actually reluctant to post the transformation photo; I've enjoyed some relief in the anonymity provided by my change in appearance...
The status quo I mentioned above has been enough to maintain my new, healthy weight. Another plus has been that by eliminating grains from my diet, I no longer have seasonal allergies to boot.
But it's time to take it to the next level. I look damn scrawny in the latest photo. I can do pushups all day and run a 5k any time, but I want better body composition. It is my goal, with the encouragement of the Superhuman50, to burn through that last bit of subcutaneous fat around my middle and build up my upper body's lean mass. I want to have well-defined musculature. I want to be Captain America, goshdarnit!
In fifty days, I will post another photo and we'll see what I will accomplish.
Everyone who participates in the Superhuman50 fills out their own personal goal sheet, including their goals, foods to avoid, and foods to include more of in daily intake. Mine looks like this:
The note about sitting might seem odd, but now that I'm about of school and catching up on a lot of personal written projects, I can easily get lost in a train of thought (seewhatididthere?) and go hours at a time without budging from my desk. Sitting isn't good for the body, and I need to spend more time working upright when possible. And yes, that is what she said.
What I love about LivingSuperhuman, and why I encourage everyone to check out their website, is that the Frezzas are incredibly encouraging in their advice and approach to overall health. They espouse paleo nutrition 99% of the time, but they also freely acknowledge that indulgences are not something to be criticized and posted on some sort of scorecard. A "cheat day" now and again is necessary to stay sane, and on that point alone they rise high above some of the more dogmatic health and nutrition writers. They want all their readers to embrace life to the fullest at every level of existence, from the physical to the emotional. I'm excited to participate in this latest project.
So, will you join the Superhuman50? Don't wait another second!
External Links:
The Superhuman50 Goal Sheet - LivingSuperhuman
Standing Desk: Its Benefits and History - Art of Manliness